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cds60601 wrote:
...even the Debian Handbook touches on this in the following section:
<snip>
More specifically, 6.2.6. Working with Several Distributions...
That section does not say to add gnome desktop from sid on stable. It says this:
For example, after having installed a Stable system, you might want to try out a software package available in Testing or Unstable without diverging too much from the system's initial state.
Gnome desktop is hardly just "a software package" and I would think sid ver diverges quite a bit from initial state, but I haven't tried it.
The reason people on here sometimes seem dogmatic is that people misquote, or selectively quote from documentation without reading it and understanding what it says. People who have read this forum for a long time have seen the results of this many many times, it's not pretty.
... and I did not mention Gnome as you allude to nor did I quote (much less misquote) - I simply posted a link for all to take away what they read into it.
You are being disingenuous by alluding that I am referring to the Op's choice of Gnome and alluding that I am selectively quoting when in fact, I presented a link for whomever to reference...
I simply addressed the juxtaposition of a user being told not to mix the Stable/Testing/Sid and what is posted at the Debian site.
A newer GNOME is probably going to break a lot of other packages in Stretch, since they change the APIs so often without providing for backwards compatibility. If you just want newer GNOME packages on a stable base, maybe you should look into flatpaks.
Thanks again to all in the thread. It's really heartening and part of why I choose to be in the Open Source world.
What I did, short version:
Remove Gnome and dependencies, set sources.list to stretch and backports only. Reinstall Gnome. I am running 3.22 and it seems fine. I plan on staying here on Stretch unless there's a compelling reason not to do so.
More info...
Why I wanted Gnome 3.26:
I have actually been very conservative in Debian. I started on Jessie a couple of years ago for my personal machine and have been learning by hacking on it and gradually got it dialed-in. There are some bits that have been complicated like firewalling and routing for virtual machines.
I knew I wanted to get to Stretch and a newer Kernel but this would break the old VMWare Player I was using. The newer VMWare Player doesn't do "Unity mode", so part of my upgrade involved moving to Virtualbox. Because it's my live environment, I setup a second machine to test all of the pieces and get them working. On that test machine I had an issue (now I can't remember what) which seemed to be fixed with Gnome 3.26. I didn't want it because it was shiny, but because it was fixing something. Whatever that was, isn't effecting my main machine.
Newer kernels are only necessary if your hardware is not supported in default stable kernel. Some non-free firmware and modules are built for and work in specific kernels.
For example, module for my Broadcom card fails to build on kernel 4.15, and needs to be updated. It's even currently removed from Buster. Sometimes hardware can experience regressions on certain kernels. The best option is to stay on LTS kernels, if possible.
Wheelerof4te wrote:Newer kernels are only necessary if your hardware is not supported in default stable kernel. Some non-free firmware and modules are built for and work in specific kernels.
For example, module for my Broadcom card fails to build on kernel 4.15, and needs to be updated. It's even currently removed from Buster. Sometimes hardware can experience regressions on certain kernels. The best option is to stay on LTS kernels, if possible.
You can get it to build if you cherry-pick a couple of patches from the Ubuntu 18.04 version, so no doubt the Debian testing version will be back up shortly.